Winter Reading: Books by TC Faculty

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A. Lin Goodwin (TC file photo)

Lesley Bartlett (TC file photo)

Three publications from TC faculty deal with the issues of social justice for U.S. children; the success of a high school in the Bronx that is home to many recent immigrants; and the history and influence of Russian mathematics education.

Injustice Writ Small

By Siddhartha Mitter

The reminder that the United States has the highest rates of child poverty among 19 industrialized countries comes early in Promoting Social Justice for Young Children
(Springer, 2011), co-edited by Beatrice S. Fennimore, professor of
education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and A. Lin Goodwin,
education professor and Vice Dean at TC. Between poverty, health care
and a public failure to safeguard their rights, “children have become
the most vulnerable subgroup in the United States,” writes contributor
Valerie Polakow.

The book’s 14 chapters cover a broad scope.
Sections on empowering parents and communities and developing education
methods that incorporate a social justice commitment are balanced by
chapters on specific issues such as the sexualization of childhood, or
the impact of the past decade’s long overseas wars on America’s
children. A cluster of chapters addresses issues in the education of
immigrant children—from dealing with the reality of families where some
members are undocumented, but not others, to the problems with the
pervasive habit (sometimes initiated by the parents themselves) of
Americanizing the names of children to make them appear less “alien.”

Still
another thread deals with how to prepare teachers to recognize and
advance social justice concerns. A chapter on teacher preparation by TC
faculty member Celia Oyler discusses, for instance, the ways teachers of
young children can shift from “deficit constructions” of what children
lack to “capacity constructions” of what children can do. Contributors
Beth A. Ferri and Jessica Bacon present the value of disability studies
in preparing teachers to identify and overcome “ableism” in their
practices.

All the writings in the book are linked by the axiom
that children have rights, but in the United States those rights are all
too often unfulfilled. The editors point out the country is one of only
three members of the United Nations not to have ratified the Convention
on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which came into force in 1990. (The
other two are Somalia and South Sudan.) The burden of advancing
children’s rights thus falls on caregivers and educators in the
classroom and community. “[We] have a lot we must do before every child
in our rich and resource-full country can be entitled to a basic level of care and social support,” writes Goodwin in the conclusion. This volume shows some of the ways forward.

The Language of School Success

By Siddhartha Mitter

Lesley
Bartlett and Ofelia García were conducting research on the educational
trajectories of Latino students when they spotted an intriguing anomaly
in at a high school in Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan.

Bartlett,
Associate Professor in TC’s department of International and
Transcultural Studies, and García, a former TC faculty member who is now
a professor of urban education at CUNY’s Graduate Center, were looking
at national high school completion rates, which a 2001 study estimated
at just 63 percent for Latinos. New York City’s rate was even lower:
between 50 and 60 percent. Amid this picture, Gregorio Luperón High
School stood out, graduating 70 to 80 percent of its students. Not only
that: the Luperón students were mostly ‘newcomers’ -- recent arrivals
from the Dominican Republic and elsewhere, whose schooling in their own
countries typically had been interrupted.

“We wondered, ‘What is
it that this school does with newcomers?’” Barlett says. “‘What do they
do to get them through?’ That was the puzzle that motivated our
inquiry.”

So began a four-year study in which Bartlett and García
immersed themselves in the Luperón community, observing classes and
interviewing students, teachers, administrators and family members to
develop a full panorama of the school and its success at bucking a
dismal trend.

Their findings are presented in Additive Schooling in Subtractive Times: Bilingual Education and Dominican Immigrant Youth in the Heights
(Vanderbilt University Press, 2011). The book is simultaneously the
story of how the school, founded in 1994, has negotiated New York City
and state education policy; an anthropology of the Luperón school
community; and a contribution to scholarship on bilingual education at a
time when bilingual programs are more often cut than created.

Luperón
itself is not merely a bilingual school; rather, it practices what
Bartlett and García call “translanguaging”—an adaptive method by which
teachers and students work in two languages as necessary, developing
skills and functioning in both. Students prepare for Regents exams in
both English and Spanish.

“It takes savvy and committed
educators to figure out how to set up and protect those models—not only
the institutions, but the pedagogical and curricular choices -- at a
time when there’s increasing emphasis on very narrow measures of teacher
quality and student learning, Regents and other standard tests,”
Bartlett says.

The Luperón team clearly meets those criteria. The
school’s co-founders were rooted in the Heights community and its
faculty and staff share what Bartlett calls “a cultural, social and
political commitment to not only the students but their families.” And
while life at the school has grown from a two-year “newcomer school” to a
four-year high school with more non-newcomer youth and all the
pressures of standardized testing and assessment -- a veteran core
group, known as “los pioneros,” have kept things anchored. “They
socialize new faculty and staff into that shared vision,” Bartlett says.

Yet as successful as Luperón has been, it is just one school,
and, as a chapter in Additive Schooling documents through interviews,
its graduates emerge into a work and higher-education landscape in which
low-income Latino immigrants face many obstacles.

“The school
piece is the first piece but it alone is not enough,” Bartlett says. “We
have to figure out the school-to-work transitional model, as well as
school-to-further schooling, to meet the needs of this specific
population.”

Bartlett and García believe Luperón’s success in
educating immigrant youth can be replicated, and in their concluding
chapter they list key ingredients for doing so. Among these are
community involvement, highly motivated staff, a school culture of
engagement, and “additive” schooling that builds social capital among
and between students and teachers in numerous ways.

All of those
attributes combine to produce what Bartlett says may be Luperón’s
ultimate strength: “This was a strikingly different school culture. The
students had a really strong sense of belonging to the school.”

From Russia, with Love... for Mathematics

By Siddhartha Mitter

In
Russia, a country famed for its contributions to mathematics and its
high standard of math teaching, the walls of math classrooms are often
adorned with the portraits of famous mathematicians.

It’s no
accident that some of those same faces can be found in pictures hanging
in the Thompson Hall office of TC’s Math, Science and Technology
Program.

During the Khrushchev era in the early 1960s, Bruce
Vogeli, now TC’s Clifford Brewster Upton Professor of Mathematical
Education and Director of the College’s Program in Mathematics
eEducation, spent half a year teaching in Moscow and has maintained
close ties with Russia ever since. By the mid-1990s, when Vogeli visited
St. Petersburg, Alexander Karp was already a well-regarded math
education specialist there. Karp came to TC as a visiting professor
in1998 and is now Associate Professor of Mathematics and Education.

Now Vogeli and Karp have produced Russian Mathematics Education,
a landmark collection offering a wealth of detail on how Russian math
education evolved from Czarist times through today, how it has weathered
the country’s political and social changes, and how teachers are
trained and all aspects of mathematics taught in Russian schools.

With
writings by 24 contributors from Russia, the United States, Poland,
Cuba, Hungary and Israel spread across two volumes -- “History and World
Significance” and “Programs and Practices” – Russian Mathematics Education has an encyclopedic heft and feel.

Several
chapters trace the history of reforms and counter-reforms in Russian
math education over the decades. The special role of high-level academic
mathematicians in curriculum development, the tradition of school
contests and Olympiads, and the influence of Russian methods on other
countries are discussed in detail. So are the specifics of teaching
algebra, geometry and calculus, as well as of teacher training,
assessment and education research.

In part, the editors say in
their introduction, the project responds to the flood of highly-trained
Russian mathematicians who have moved to the West since the Gorbachev
period, and to curiosity about the system that has produced such talent.
But more broadly, the book is a lens onto a culture in which a positive
attitude toward mathematics is a signature point of pride.

In
the United States “you hear a lot of negative stories about
mathematics,” Karp says. “People say, ‘Oh, I don’t understand
mathematics,’ or ‘I hated math’ or ‘I was afraid of mathematics.’ In
Russia, for many reasons, the general attitude is very different.”

Those
reasons include “a tradition of long and serious treatment of objects
and a culture of reasoning and discussion and exploring of these
objects,” Karp says. Russian schools emphasize “intensive lessons in
which the teacher organizes activities in a meaningful sequence, which
gives students an opportunity to really think about the subject on their
own level.

“It’s a fantastic thing when you can see that
students are not necessarily mathematical geniuses, but are actively
thinking mathematically,” he says. “It’s really mathematics for all.”

Then,
too, Russian math teachers typically have more mathematics training
than their counterparts in many other countries. A Russian elementary
school teacher might not have to teach calculus, but having mastered the
topic, she is in a position to prepare students to engage and
appreciate it down the line.

The experience of student teachers
is different as well. Karp recalls from his own training as a
mathematics teacher at St. Petersburg’s Herzen University that he logged
far fewer classroom hours than American preservice teachers, but that
those hours were more intense.

“It’s not just giving a lesson,”
he says. “You have to write what you are going to say, how you think
students will respond, what will be written on the blackboard, et
cetera. Then you give this lesson and all your fellow students are
there. And then it’s discussed.”

Yet Russian Mathematics Education
doesn’t turn a blind eye to the dark side of its topic. At times during
Soviet history, ideology and anti-Semitism impinged on education and
drove talented teachers and academics from their positions. Mathematics
retained its privileged place and drew the best students in the Soviet
era in part because the regime devalued the humanities and gutted
training in those fields.

Today math – like all education fields –
faces new challenges in Russia. Economic opportunity is prompting many
young people to choose professions that are more lucrative than
teaching. Karp says a culture of fast money and corruption at high
levels of government are also hurting education. Further, Russian
education is becoming highly centralized again after a time of loosening
and experimentation in the immediate post-Soviet period. And Karp says
the system’s attempts to grapple with issues such as teacher evaluation
have achieved mixed results.

Karp’s hope is that Russian Mathematics Education
offers something for everyone—from those who want to understand and
emulate Russian methods to historians of education and anyone interested
in Russia in general. No tradition is immune to change or destruction,
he says, but thus far mathematics education in Russia has produced
something any educator can appreciate: “It gives youth the opportunity
to really explore something.”